


Amplify

by Problem_Starchild



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Complete, Destroy Ending, Gen, Motherhood, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-06
Updated: 2019-08-06
Packaged: 2020-08-10 05:11:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20129887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Problem_Starchild/pseuds/Problem_Starchild
Summary: The metal mouth in the sky gives a deafening crimson cry that silences the machines. There is only one with the voice to have sung that note. Her song is ending. You will not let that happen.





	Amplify

**Author's Note:**

> This work is from the perspective of a twice-spared rachni queen, so please go into this expecting a somewhat abstract perspective on personal boundaries and motherhood.

Crimson fills your mind all at once in a single high note, and the color is stark, violent, resonating with regret. It fills the senses like a scream, but there’s no sound to it, and as quick as you see it, the sound is gone. Something has changed. Something you can't feel. The creatures that stole your children have ended, and the machines no longer trumpet their disgusting gray through the atmosphere like a disease. The great station above the sky comes apart in the deafening juniper hush that sinks over your world like a blanket of dust: its arms fall to pieces, and it looks like a child’s mouth, broken, hungry, starving. Even from here, you hear it crying, crying, begging for a mother’s attention.

The mouth is evocative, but something else there demands your thoughts, your alien songmate with so many fingers and not enough eyes calls to you, colors of despair – blue, orange, blue, each one brighter and more urgent than the last as she comes to in a pile of rubble. The alternating hues are a pox that you respond to with an overwhelming cerulean – calm, soft, comforting. Her song of distress fades as she fills you with knowledge, visual information from so few different eyes, dull colors and sounds, but enough to _know_, to see. _Destruction, death_, the sounds ring in her heart like the mournful memories of the singing planet, and so the sorrow rings in your heart as well.

You know of the plans, the victims, you know deeply of the one meant to solve it all: for you and your children, for this planet of water, mountains, and mist, for the strange children who inhabit the corners of the galaxy. You’ve sung of her great mercy and forgiveness for years, and when your children were lost to you again, you sang with renewed fervor to the new children, the second future she had given you. You had looked back as you escaped from a world of shackles: she held her own child, several times her size -- one of _those_ children, who had chased your mothers to their private sanctuaries and turned the singing planet to a silent tomb. The blood of her child collected in a murky orange pool beneath their feet as she struggled to hold him up in a surge of blue, and you didn't envy her the fright at her young warrior's song, yellow with pain and and white with fear.

Her sacrifice had been for you, so you honored it and escaped your sunken prison.

Loss is a bleak verse in the history of your mothers, one that’s been sung since before you broke the egg. You are the first queen ever to sing an aria of foreign mercy, and your royal daughters will carry _her_ empathy into the golden age you see before you.

When your warrior children are sure the silence of the machines is complete, you emerge from the ground with their nimble siblings.

Another mother -- another planet’s pride and joy needs _your _mercy, now, and if your children wish to thrive in the new world you’ve built together, you need her voice to join with your own on behalf of your daughters. In the rachni's new songbook, each voice is precious, and none is more beautiful to those who would seek to harm your legacy than _hers._

From your heart, you produce a rallying cry, a blaze of orange and white that lights a fire in the hearts of all who hear.

Hundreds of children race beneath your feet as they repair your vessel, a once-vibrant lilac thing, now cold blue in its stillness. The empty echo from inside sounds like a collapsing hive to be, dark and muddy and threatening. You sing of light, of soft teal tones whispering in a warm umber underworld, of red mingling with orange like old friends, of suns and stars, a warm tribute to a friend and savior. Valor is gold, and it twines through your voice, strengthening your brood. Your children hear the truth in the warmth, inoculating themselves against the fear of the cold.

Your craft flies again, in time. The time is short, but little feels long when you’ve lived in a frozen slumber for centuries, considering colors you can’t name and sounds you want to learn. When you close your eyes, you see a million hues from eight hundred eyes, hear a hundred sounds. A smaller mind, a smaller heart could not bear it. You are made of understanding, the song that interprets the discordant melody of the universe. You love, you _must_ love, or cease to be — as one, as all.

A dark sky gives way to a sad metal mouth against a backdrop of ultramarine green and pyroclastic ash gray, billowing across the surface of the planet you left as a drop of dye passes through water. You descend on the broken jaw, and all of you pours out from the craft. You feel, deeply, the hollowness of this place — hear the way it aches to be saved, to be fed, to be tended to. It demands a care it has never been without. 

Your foremothers never set foot here, on this alien hive called Citadel. The memories you make now are the first of their kind. 

Your children scatter from you as they begin their tireless search for materials, and you quiet yourself as you walk, singing to address each child as they bombard you with their vibrant curiosity. _Which of these do we need? Is this safe to touch? How much?_

It is a heavy body you possess, but you carry it on a tune, and where to go next comes to you as easily as teaching a baby. 

Where does a child put food?

You find the human in the cold, unforgiving cradle of the station’s mouth. She sings, still, reflexively — not with purpose, not with conviction, but her lungs continue in smoky blue and red, color and sound flowing from her with a strength unbecoming of her kind, even as she lies buried. Her tenacity is so much that you wonder if perhaps she does not know _how_ to stop singing. Your children are upon you and hundreds of legs move dozens of stones. Something younger than stones. Something white and brittle, like the dead. It doesn’t have the life to it of natural ribbons of minerals and silica.

The small thing below you gasps as your children reveal her, piece by piece. Her song is so quiet, her colors blur together with yellow in the discord of pain, though you don’t feel her mind reach out for yours as she sleeps. The children run here and there — scouting, collecting something burgundy, something safe and sun yellow, something blue and useful. Things you recognize from the war you never took part in, things you know will help. Below you, her small, soft being heaves, and you sing into it — sing, and sing, urgent orange notes of spicy wind and bitter blue skies, cold red water, the color of her blood, ultraviolet stars that sear her memory in a hazy shade of luminescent. You sing in celebration, in exultation, your throat is full and your children extend your song to the far reaches of this wide open mouth as they return with things – something white and flat, a box of supplies, an alien you know to be as much companion as daughter.

She returns with your children, cerulean in skin and a soft, silky green in compassion. Her song is crisp and bright and she comes to you with fumbling hands, colorless words and vivid intentions that light your consciousness. Her colors are vivid, but don’t come from her voice – her thoughts are strong, but her trust is stronger, and through her, you harmonize with the song you sing through the harmed one. Two limbs with too many small appendages grasp and use tools which you understand, but can’t learn to wield so quickly. Through the strength of your voice, dark metals are banished from pale skin. Sunspotted cream the color of bleached sand creeps out from beneath, angry red and despairingly blackened with burns.

The colorless blue one touches her hands to the quiet one, administering the salve, the balm, with scaled fingertips. The feedback of both songs shakes you when they touch each other, the bitter white cold of harsh medicine on a screaming epidermis. These creatures have no exoskeletons, and sharing their intimate songs makes you feel frighteningly small at times, like a single drop of water in a sea of sour yellow. You know better than to fear. Through your voice, you know them as intimately as you know your children. In this moment, they are you, and you are them.

Her song strengthens, the small one, with the flame-bright hair. The deep blue of her breath becomes steady and clear, the murky red fades into nothing. Her mottled burns are treated by five-fingered hands, your children have moved to clean her body where it isn’t too burnt for hardened hands to touch. Each brush of rachni hands on human skin leaves soft blue cries in your mind – broken bones here, swelling there. Each filed away, each piece of relevant equipment prepared by the eldest and smartest of your children.

“Shepard,” you verbalize through the soft mouth of this colorless alien child, tone reflecting all of what you must say and none of what you wish to. Your true voice may fill her being, but she may never understand it. It is the tragedy of the creatures who never knew the resonant beauty of Suen. “Do not fear the light in your dreams.”

She stirs, but doesn’t wake, and the blue of her washes across the rubble on the floor like a welcoming fog. You close six eyes, flashing colors along your back as you sing to her.

“We have come, Shepard. Your song will continue.”


End file.
